28-06-2012, 09:27 AM
From James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, Chapter Three: JFK and Vietnam, page 93:
Ten years before he became president, John F. Kennedy learned that it would be impossible to win a colonial war in Vietnam.
In 1951, when he was a young member of Congress, Kennedy visited Vietnam with his twenty-two-year-old brother, Robert. At the time France was trying to reassert control over its pre-World War II colony of Indochina. Although the French army's commander in Saigon insisted to the Kennedys that his 250,000 troops couldn't possibly lose to the Viet Minh guerrillas, JFK knew better. He was convinced by the more skeptical view of Edmund Gullion, an official at the U.S. Consulate. Kennedy knew and trusted Gullion, who had helped him earlier as a speechwriter on foreign policy.
Author's source: Note 1 Richard D. Mahoney, JFK: Ordeal in Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 108.
I saw a ten-minute silent black and white propaganda film of Viet Minh pulling howitzers up a jungle hillside, long ropes with many men, led by frenzied macheteros clearing the path.
Why would someone place seventy thousand at the foot of high gun emplacementsoh, they'll never be able to get up there.
Kennedy saw the same fatal hubris in the CIA Bay of Pigs.
Did he turn on, tune in, trip out with Mary? Can we believe Tim Leary?
I saw Baba Ram Das in Ginsberg's harmonium trio and the former was mum.
A Cheshire Cat smile.
Ten years before he became president, John F. Kennedy learned that it would be impossible to win a colonial war in Vietnam.
In 1951, when he was a young member of Congress, Kennedy visited Vietnam with his twenty-two-year-old brother, Robert. At the time France was trying to reassert control over its pre-World War II colony of Indochina. Although the French army's commander in Saigon insisted to the Kennedys that his 250,000 troops couldn't possibly lose to the Viet Minh guerrillas, JFK knew better. He was convinced by the more skeptical view of Edmund Gullion, an official at the U.S. Consulate. Kennedy knew and trusted Gullion, who had helped him earlier as a speechwriter on foreign policy.
Author's source: Note 1 Richard D. Mahoney, JFK: Ordeal in Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 108.
~~~
Why would someone place seventy thousand at the foot of high gun emplacementsoh, they'll never be able to get up there.
Kennedy saw the same fatal hubris in the CIA Bay of Pigs.
Did he turn on, tune in, trip out with Mary? Can we believe Tim Leary?
I saw Baba Ram Das in Ginsberg's harmonium trio and the former was mum.
A Cheshire Cat smile.